Wednesday, 21 December 2011

Customer Service in UAE and UK

I was recently interviewed by Swindon Local Radio as part of my work with Swindon Coaching Team. I was asked to compare customer service in UAE with that of UK. I posted on the EIU Opinion Leaders' Panel and got this response: That's interesting as I see the lack of authority as a widespread problem in customer service, not just in the UAE. We did some research earlier this year on the future of customer service and one of our key findings was that customer service leaders are much more likely to empower their staff to make decisions when resolving customer issues, compared with average firms. And while weaker firms are investing more heavily in standardised service processes, leading firms are prioritising staff training and development. Here's the link to the full report - Service 2020 - hope you find it of interest: http://www.businessresearch.eiu.com/service-2020.html

here is an extract

Lessons from service leaders

If customer service is going to be increasingly important in the decade ahead, what are the leading practitioners already doing differently today? In our survey, about 16% of executives describe their firms as “excellent” at customer service, relative to their peers. Segmenting these firms against those that rate themselves as merely average, or below average, yields some insights into how some leading customer service practitioners are working:

• While the average firms of today compete primarily on quality, service leaders unsurprisingly already prioritise customer service as their competitive differentiator, far ahead of cost. In line with this, these firms are far more systematic about implementing proper systems for tracking customer feedback and complaints, as well as identifying potential service weaknesses. Nearly 50% more have these in place, ahead of weaker rivals.

• Three quarters of customer service leaders have empowered their staff to make decisions when resolving customer issues, compared with less than half among average firms. And while weaker firms are investing more heavily in standardised service processes, leading firms are prioritising staff training and development, and also working harder to define service standards and goals.

• While both strong and weak service firms see information-enabled consumers as a major driver for change in recent years, weaker firms think communications technology is the primary driver, while leaders see competition as the defining force.

• Service leaders are more focussed on social media already: they monitor it more closely, use it more often to connect with clients and generally collect more external data to feed into their tracking systems. Related to this, a far higher proportion of leaders say their firms are excellent, or above average, at using technology to understand their customers.

• Finally, while service leaders expect to use service to stand out from the crowd, it is largely only the weaker firms that expect typically to charge a premium for this service.